What are Pie and Coffee readers and contributors doing for Lent?
Among other things, I’ll be participating in the Worcester Lenten fast and prayer for an end to the Iraq War. I’m not sure yet what form my fasting will take.
Feel free to post your thoughts below, or link to a blog post. Contributors, feel free to add resources to this post.
From the pope’s Lenten message:
The Gospel highlights a typical feature of Christian almsgiving: it must be hidden: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,†Jesus asserts, “so that your alms may be done in secret†(Mt 6,3-4). . . . If, in accomplishing a good deed, we do not have as our goal God’s glory and the real well being of our brothers and sisters, looking rather for a return of personal interest or simply of applause, we place ourselves outside of the Gospel vision.
So I assume everybody is giving alms, and you don’t have to mention that.
I also love how we inevitably seem to read the Gospel about going into your closet to pray, about washing your face and putting on clean clothes…and then we all walk out of there with a very clear mark of ashes on our faces!
I’m trying to be more faithful in the Daily Office. And I’m hoping the family schedule will extent to daily mass at least once during the week.
I mostly grew up in Oklahoma, where:
A: The only reasonable mass to get to from the suburbs was evening
and
B: If anyone saw ashes on your forehead, 99% they’d say, “Here, lemme get that off for ya…”
So of course the first thing we did when we got home was wash our faces.
It was a huge change to move to New Jersey. On my first Ash Wednesday there, I was in a business meeting with 8 other people as noon approached. I cleared my voice and said, “I’m going to leave now, I need to go to Church…” and *everyone* said, “Oh, yeah…” and carpooled to mass!
Even better was Manhattan, where for one day a year you could look at those hundreds of strangers on the subway and say, “Ah, my brothers and sisters.”
I used to leave the ashes on in NYC because of the solidarity. I don’t feel so much of that here, maybe because of the lack of crowds, so I’m back to spit-scrubbing my forehead after mass.
I’m within walking distance of the Cathedral at work, and they have a convenient 12:10 Mass, nicely scheduled to give downtown workers a little bit of time after noon to get there, so that should be nice.